


hope your road is a long one

by thedevilchicken



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Aging, Death, F/M, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 20:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20570768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Abigail has had a good life. Charles Vane might be dead, but he's been there for most of it.





	hope your road is a long one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maplemood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/gifts).

For as long as she can remember, Abigail has seen ghosts. 

They're different everywhere she's been, but they usually have two things in common: they're usually the ghosts of the recently deceased, and they usually don't try to speak to her. 

She's seen some that seemed older - they wear odd clothes like she's seen in old paintings hanging on walls in important places, and when they mutter to themselves the words they say seem like something from a book or a play her father read her when she was young. They drift by, thin and insubstantial, on their way to who knows where. She's never tried to follow. 

And sometimes, they do try to speak to her - it's not often, and it's not for long, and usually it's only a few words at most. Most think she's some lost loved one and they call her by their names. None of them even seem to know they're dead. She's never felt menaced by them because she learned early on in life that they can't touch; there's just something rather sad about it. 

Except him, of course. But he's an exception in a lot of ways. 

She's had a good life, or at least as good as any she had any right to expect. Relatives took her in and she married well, to a kind man who treated her well and wanted very little in return. They had two children, one girl and one boy, who have both grown up to be precisely the kind of people she would have wished them to be. Importantly, neither has her gift. One of her grandchildren has, but she's taught him not to say a word to anyone about it. Life is simpler that way.

She's had a good life. But she knows that each time she lifted a fork, or danced, or brushed her hair, he was watching. Each time she and her husband went to bed, he was watching then, too. He's always been there, since the day he died, and she finds she hasn't minded one bit.

"I wish I could've stayed in Nassau," he tells her. He's sitting on her bedroom dresser, swinging his legs; if he were real, his bootheels would drum against the paintwork, but he's not been real for more years than she could name. "This place bores the fuck out of me. Doesn't it bore you?" 

She smiles. She's lying in bed in her long white nightdress, tucked up underneath the quilt but she's still a little cold; she's so much older now and she feels the cold so much more bitterly, not like the heat back in her youth. She's older and her hair's been grey for a very long time, and it lies in a long, winding plait across her pillow. Like a noose, she thinks, almost like the one that killed him. Once upon a time, he told her how that felt. The tone of his voice made her shiver, the way it did when he spoke when she touched herself. He liked to watch, and she liked him watching. 

"I didn't ask you to stay, Charles," she replies, but there's no sting to it, just fond amusement. 

He clucks his tongue. He shrugs. "No. But I don't hear you telling me to go." Truthfully, she never has.

He still looks the same as he did back then: he's all long, bedraggled hair and salt-stained clothes worn almost to destruction, rings on his fingers and in the lobes of his ears. He's the illusion of muscle over bone beneath tanned skin, not conventionally handsome as her husband was, but even now she feels the pull of attraction. He's retained his sharp edges where all the other ghosts have slowly faded into nothing. Over the years, the shape of him has only come to sharper focus for her. 

Her husband died eight years ago, peacefully, in his sleep; she saw him after, fleetingly, just long enough to say goodbye. Since then, as she's drawn closer to the end, the ghost of Charles Vane has been her sole companion. She's never felt alone, and has felt grateful for that. 

Now, he hops down from the dresser. Now, he crosses the room. Apparitions have no substance in the world but when he kneels by the bed and he takes her hand, she feels it. That's a comfort she didn't expect.

"Will you take me there?" she asks. "Nassau. The way you knew it before the scaffold." 

His mouth twists, wryly. "I'll give you the time of your life," he says. "Just close your eyes."

She does. And she knows she'll never open them again.

Nassau is not so very far away. And Charles has waited so long to return.

**Author's Note:**

> Title, very originally, from _Ithaka_ by C. P. Cavafy.


End file.
